School Family

My son received a card in the mail from his new teacher welcoming him to 4th grade. The teacher included the much-anticipated supply list. Fortunately, I already have a good number of items on it (like the glue sticks and boxes of crayons I picked up for 20 cents each during my mid-summer buying frenzy). Unfortunately, the entire list was written in Spanish, so I have to take my son’s translation at its word.

He’s in a Spanish immersion program, the hope being that his early start will give him a good shot at learning the language).

The list renewed an argument my son and I started when school ended in June. He came home on his final day of school, pulled his ratty old notebook from his backpack, and began tearing out the pages that had been used. He told me he intended to reuse the notebook when school started up again. My blood ran cold. I may have mentioned before that my fondness for spiral-bound notebooks borders on being creepy. Little gives me as much pleasure as a brand-new notebook and its promise of words yet written. When I give my child a pristine notebook each fall, it symbolizes a fresh start to a new school year.

I told all of this to my son. He’d have none of it. He formed a rational argument about wasted paper and the need to protect our planet by recycling and reusing. I did what I always do when I sense I’m losing an argument to one of my children. “We’ll discuss this another time,” I said.

Argh! They got me. I swore I wouldn’t be sucked into the back-to-school shopping hype until the first day was clearly in sight. But then I saw an ad for 10-cent notebooks.

Just one dime for 70 spiral-bound pages! I just knew the offer would be gone by Aug. 27 (which, in my town, is the day before school begins and which, if past years are any indicator, is when I would have started my back-to-school shopping).

My personal weakness for notebooks propelled me to the store, where across the aisle I spotted boxes of 24-count crayons for 20 cents each. Now, if I took all of the barely used crayons in my home and laid them end to end, they would circle the earth seven times. Yet at 20 cents for 24 crayons (that’s less than a penny each!), I felt it would be irresponsible not to buy a couple of boxes. Then I spotted the glue sticks….

I prefer to delay back-to-school shopping until the last possible moment. If a school supply enters my thoughts before the end of August, I lose my ability to sustain the illusion that summer will last forever. When a school-related television commercial comes on, I mute the sound and pick up a book. On Sundays, I pull open the newspaper, scoop out the stacks of flyers, and dump them into the recycling bin. But despite all of my precautions, that ad for the 10-cent notebooks slipped through. I’m already feeling the chilly fall air.